Ephemeral Ocean - The Efflorescence mp3 album

Original: Doom-Metal.com ( http://www.doom-metal.com/reviews.php?album=2921 )Yet another Russian band lay siege to the world of Doom. Hailing from Moscow, Ephemeral Ocean bring a mix of sorrow and pain, expressed with ever- changing melodies and depressing sweeping vocals, through this offering entitled ’The Efflorescence’. You can clearly see the Death Doom/Progressive Metal side of things within their music. Whilst they remind me of Opeth with the use of clean vocals and death grunts and very unusual structures and melody changes, Ephemeral Ocean don't quite match up to the aforementioned. The overall result is very good. Everything is well balanced and you don't feel like anything should be taken out. I just found myself struggling to make sense of the musical direction of the band, as a whole, on the first few listens - but they do have some clever parts in the songs and I started to warm to the album. 'One More Carnation' is a great example of this and it works when they compose music like this. Most of the songs are about the five minute mark and this is definitely one album you have to listen to a few times to really get into all the passages of music. I really like the last song 'No Will'; this is over 9 minutes. I think this really demonstrates the band's strengths. Great building of melodies and tempos give a really satisfying ending to the album. The production of the whole album is great, and everything is recorded well - especially the vocals. I would have liked a bit more bass cutting through on some parts. The drums drive the music along and there are enough breaks and tempo changes to give a different feel to each song. The vocals, when clean, are mournful and sad and float effortlessly on the clean guitar parts. I would have loved to hear even more of these on the heavy sections to mix it up a bit. The growling parts are what you would expect and the mix between the screams and the clean works really well. Vocally, you can see references to other bands but the clean tones are unusual and different, and I liked them. Some of the clean guitar parts remind me of Before the Rain , dreamy and moody they really work well. Overall, a pleasant album to sink your teeth into. Not a monster, but just maybe a sleeping giant. Reviewer's rating: 8/10

Original: ConcreteWeb ( http://www.concreteweb.be/reviews/ephemeral-ocean )Moscow-based Ephemeral Ocean are quite a young band, formed in 2013. In April 2014 the band self-released a demonstrational MCD / EP, Honour In The Mask, and after some line-up changes, they did enter the studio again to record their debut full length. The result, by the way, was mixed and mastered at the famous Priority Recording Studio by nobody else but Esoteric’s Greg Chandler (!). The album was (is) called The Efflorescence, and it got released by two of the greatest Russian labels, Frozen Light and Moscow Funeral League.The Efflorescence has a total running time of forty minutes. The album stands for a traditional, and therefore highly melodic (in this case even extremely melodic, and then I am referring to the focus on dual guitar leads and tremolo riffing) form of Doom-Death from the old school. A mixture of My Dying Bride, Evadne, Faal, Anathema, Evoken, Monolithe, Forest Stream and so on, that’s the direction to follow. There is quite some variation, both vocally and instrumentally, as well as within composition structure and tempo. A few passages are rather grooving, some quite depressive, then again modernised or at least modestly progressive (especially within the more experimental excerpts), yet the basics remain rooted within the tradition of the early-nineties’ scene.I know that the next phrase is subjective, but I did expect more, much more, from this release. It’s not that I get bored by The Efflorescence, but each time I listened to it, I was waiting for something that never came. Something impressive, something distinctive, something special would have been fine, for the overall result sounds way too flat, too superficial, too safe. Okay, my expectations were (too) high, seen the labels involved, yet anyhow, this album lacks of that little more. The craftsmanship is all right, but the song writing gasps for fresher air (or maybe, on the contrary, more smoggy nebulae).Ivan Tibos.67/100